


in these hewn havens lie

by hitlikehammers



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (And In Part Because I Don't Care and I Wanted to Write Happy Endings Damnit), Against All Hope or Logic, Angst with a Happy Ending, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Here At The End of All Things, M/M, Reunions, Tolkien's Letters Are Up For Interpretation (Due in Part to Internal Contradictions), Undying Lands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 19:24:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14796486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: Peace. That's what they told him he was sailing toward, but how could that be what awaited on those otherworldly shores? Peace was a thing married to wholeness, in its way. Married to a softened heart; a settled soul.And Bilbo had lost too much of his heart with the stopping of another—with the last breath of the dwarf he'd given his heartto—for him to find peace, he fears. Perhaps ever again.Or: The Tale of WhatDoes, in fact, await Bilbo Baggins—if Peace isn't quite in the cards.





	in these hewn havens lie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RC_McLachlan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RC_McLachlan/gifts).



> For my lovely [RC_McLachlan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RC_McLachlan), a belated birthday gift because, well. Because I'm rather belated with most things but you KNOW THE LOVE IS THERE so that's maybe okay. You said you were in a bit of a Bilbo/Thorin mood, and you said you were okay with happy endings after "death", and hey, Tolkien gives a lot of leeway for that.
> 
> To which points, if anyone feels the deep desire to poke at the canonicity of any such thing occurring: I am taking Letter 325 from _The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien_ as my guide for mortals over the Sea. And regarding our dear dwarf: if Gimli gets to sail with Legolas than Thorin can pop up and build Bilbo a home. Because Ilúvatar created the Ainur first, and it is indeed the _spirit_ of the thing that counts. Here, at least.
> 
> Also, let's all be real and admit that the Secret Fire/Flame Imperishable/"Flame of Anor" is Tolkien's Trinitarianism coming out hardcore and leave it there.
> 
> Also un-beta'd, because this was late enough as it was.

“I fear you may be quite missing the point, my dear Bilbo.”

Bilbo turns toward the voice, slowly: not merely because his body is still straining against its years, but also because his eyes are fixed to the horizon he only imagines, for there is none before him. The light refracts so as to look like thick fog, too brilliant for simply eyes such as his own; Bilbo had read the legends, hummed the lays as best he could guess them in the ageless volumes in Rivendell, but this.

This is something else entire.

“Hmm?” Bilbo meets Gandalf’s eyes, if only in his peripheral vision, pock-marked by the echoes, the afterimage in the beams of light that create the mist beyond.

“You were granted passage for the promise of peace,” Gandalf says, leaning against the edge of the ship, brow quirked and arms folded. “And if peaceful’s what you are, you certainly don’t look it.”

“Ah,” Bilbo says, turning back to the boundless sea-sky and losing something to the emptiness that awaits, unseen. He won’t deny the truth in those words, and yet—

“But I think perhaps I am beginning to feel it,” Bilbo says, ignoring the pop of joints in his neck as he turns again, but notes the lack of the same in his knuckles when he flexes his hands: still craggy and wrinkled, but able again, or getting thereabouts. 

“And besides,” Bilbo adds, a little wistful; a little hopeless for all kinds of hope: “we’re not there yet.”

“Age has made you patient,” Gandalf comments idly after a beat of silence, and Bilbo can’t quite tell if it’s honest, or needling, or a bit of both.

No matter.

“Age has made me many things.” And hasn’t it just. Withered; weary. Fragmented, fragile, forlorn. Heavy with nameless burden; heartbroken, so long that he’s not sure what the world looks like without that watery colour in his gaze.

“You won’t age any longer,” Gandalf tells him, and it’s meant to be a balm, Bilbo knows. He knows, just the same, that he’s being 

“But neither will I grow young.”

“No,” Gandalf nods, almost dismissively; as if it is of no consequence, not really. And perhaps it isn’t. “Not exactly, not in this form.” He nods to Bilbo’s hands where they’re flexing still without conscious thought: “But you will feel young again,”

“How does it work, then,” Bilbo muses, less than he demands, his eyes again on the sightless sea where it devours infinity; or is devoured by in kind. “I will feel young until my ancient bones give way?”

“Very few mortals have sailed this route,” Gandalf says, his own eyes turning toward the mist but undoubtedly seeing the shimmering truth of it beyond Bilbo’s ken. “And the stories have become muddled over time, one saying this, the other that.” Gandalf chuckles, more like a breath than a laugh but undeniably fond in it all, nevertheless. 

“Opposites,” he declares them. “Impossibilities,” he nearly mocks.

“Some say you will age without visible proof, without even feeling as much, until indeed,” Gandalf nods, a little solemn, a little inevitable; “your bones give way.”

“I rather like to believe a different story,” Gandalf says, whimsical in just a half-breath like he was once, when he asked if a young, fussy hobbit wished to go on an adventure; when his eyes twinkled—and there’s a spark of it here, just now, and maybe Gandalf’s feeling peace beginning to settle in, too—when his eyes twinkled so many lifetime ago, unearned, and changed each and every one of those lifetime,s for Bilbo, beyond recognition or design. 

“I prefer to believe in a story wherein the choice lies in your hands,” Gandalf says, his mouth forming the words languidly, lips almost open, lax as if he’s smoking an invisible pipe: the same soft pleasure in his words as was always in his body for a breath of Old Toby. “Mortality was a gift, after all, and the blessing of Valinor for one such as yourself is that you are able to use that gift as you will.” Gandalf considers him closely before speaking with deep meaning: 

“In _peace_.”

And Bilbo breathes, and it doesn’t hurt in his lungs, just sears in his heart and what is peace, how can it be something he’ll ever know, against that?

“Hmm,” is the only reply he can give.

“Something troubles you still.” A statement, rather than an observation. Knowing beyond knowing at all.

“As I’ve said,” Bilbo speaks into the coruscating blur; “I’m beginning to feel it,” he admits, his knees feeling just this side of spry. “Younger, with fire in my limbs again,” his lips quirk, yet he knows it’s not in joy, not exactly: “but it almost seems,” his voice fails unexpectedly. 

Or maybe it’s entirely expected.

“Yes?” Gandalf coaxes, and Bildo could lie, or put him off, but why, really?

“It almost seems as if my heart is living backward,” Bilbo admits, eyes far away; “in the process.”

“Ah.”

“I never,” Bilbo speaks, harsh and rough like the shards of broken self inside his chest, even after to much time. “I couldn’t—”

“I know,” Gandalf interjects gently, and suddenly he’s close enough to place a steadying hand on Bilbo’s shoulder. “You never had to give it words for me to know.”

And Bilbo is grateful, in that. He doesn't even need to know when Gandalf recognised what was in his heart, so full and thrumming wild under the broad hands of a King, a proud leader: Bilbo’s beautiful dwarf under the stars as they trekked, quiet and intimate in the night.

“Wizard or angel, I’ve never been sure with you,” Bilbo says, a little careful, a little bit of a smile.

“Your friend,” Gandalf corrects him with a squeeze of the hands still at Bilbo’s shoulder. “I knew, and have always known, because I am your _friend_ , Bilbo Baggins, and I care for you.”

Bilbo can only nod, then. Can only swallow hard, and nod, and cover Gandalf’s hand with his own.

“It became a dull ache, over time,” Bilbo confesses in barely a whisper. “But now...”

He chokes on air, merely air before he gains his voice again:

“Perhaps,” he asks the endlessness, more than he asks Gandalf or any living being; he asks the infinite universe, the gods and the god beyond them as if they’re listening to this moment, here and now. “Is this necessary? If I’m to have peace?” Bilbo’s voice cracks: 

“Must I _make_ peace?”

There’s no answer, from anywhere, and Bilbo just shakes his head, his voice thin and stuffed with grief clawed back open and bleeding freer with every passing moment.

“I don’t want to,” Bilbo murmurs, chin bowing to his chest as Gandalf moves his hand against Bilbo’s shoulders blades comfortingly, reassuringly. “I want to feel,” Bilbo starts, stammers; “I don’t want to lose what little is left of him, I—”

And Bilbo’s words get lost in a sob, in which there is no peace, nor anything even close.

“Oh,” Gandalf sighs, the way he seeing audible in the exhales: “oh.”

“Maybe,” Bilbo takes a shaky breath; “maybe when we are closer, maybe it will feel,” and Bilbo doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. Bilbo doesn’t know how to lie about _this_ , so Gandalf, _dear_ Gandalf, finishes for him in a way that’s fitting enough:

“Maybe.”

________________________

Bilbo is enjoying the way his limited mortal sight can start to see the glimmering of the light on the water from this new angle, just breathing lighter than he has in many moons and reminding himself to savor it as best he’s able—and able he is, newly so, just…

Just perhaps not as willing as he should be, given the blessing he’s been offered.

“Master Hobbit.”

Bilbo takes a moment to turn, blinking long before he does: he and this particular Elf have long come to an understanding, a familiarity, a fondness between them, and Bilbo lets his lips quirk a little before he bows his chin and says, not without deference entirely, but not _with_ deference, exactly either:

“My Lord Elrond.”

Elrond’s own mouth curves, and Bilbo thinks himself lucky in this long—too long, perhaps, and maybe not much longer, or too much longer, how is he to know?—but Bilbo considers himself lucky, indeed, not least to have gained the trust and convivial affection of one such as Elrond Halfelven. 

“You have failed to sit second breakfast since your arrival,” Elrond tells him, quirking a brow.

Blibo blinks, quickly this time.

“Why on _earth_ would you be serving second breakfast?”

Elrond, impossibly, quirks his brow just a little bit higher.

“We are hospitable hosts,” he says simply, and there’s that curl of the lips on those noble features, serene almost to someone who didn’t recognise their humor, who had not spent so many days amongst the elves, and this particular Elf specifically. 

“That you are, to a fault,” Bilbo replies dryly. “I have no appetite for it,” Bilbo sighs, and then turns a critical eye to his companion: “Though you must never confess that to another Hobbit. I was already an oddity to my people, but for this I would barely be considered anything more than a Man, short of stature and curly of foot.”

“Your secrets are safe with me,” Elrond bows his head solemnly, which makes it all the more absurd, between them, but then he straightens, and the humor fades. 

“And yet, I cannot help by express some,” Elrond pauses; “concern.”

And Bilbo appreciates it. Might even recognize from whence it comes. Yet—

“I have dwelt among the elves too long, I fear,” he sighs, a touch dramatically; “though I’ll never subsist on lembas alone, thank the Valar.”

“Unfortunately, you were only ever subjected to Glorfindel’s recipe,” Elrond volleys, just a hair short of Bilbo’s own put-upon facade. “Had there been occasion, the variety offered in the Greenwood, so long ago,” Elrond’s face falls, just a little as he sighs, shaking his head just the smallest bit. 

“Well. Perhaps sometime you will have the chance, from here.”

“No need for travel rations when there are feasts aplenty,” Bilbo counters; they’re feted every evening almost from thin air; Bilbo doesn’t necessarily find himself in possession of the palate for all of what’s served, but nonetheless.

“For academic purposes, then,” Elrond needles, and Bilbo gives, because he sees no reason to do otherwise.

“Perhaps, indeed.”

There is silence, and somehow it’s the first time that Bilbo notices the sound of the sea, and its otherworldly beauty; a beauty that would have been foreign to him even before he found himself here, for all the green he’d known for so many of his days.

“I find it necessary to reiterate, beyond the issue of your appetite,” Elrond’s voice overwhelms the waves, soft but still too much for the gentle ebb and flow to outweigh: 

“What ails you, Bilbo?”

And the concern is kind, is perhaps still unearned, even now, and Bilbo should take it with gratitude.

He should do now, as ever in his experience, do many things.

“It is nothing,” Bilbo shies from the truth, the ache that won’t leave even here: that’s dulled and that Bilbo finds himself resenting for the dulling, because the loss, and the way that it persisted was the way that Bilbo remembered, reassured himself that it happened, that he loved beyond reason or sense, once upon a time. That Bilbo had given his heart and perhaps never got it back. That it had been real, and that the King Under the Mountain had given some part of him in return, if not his heart, then something.

Something for Bilbo to _keep_ , because where it lodged it had hurt, and in hurting it could never die.

“I think we must understand the word ‘nothing’ rather differently,” Elrond interrupts the spiral of his thoughts, and Bilbo opens his mouth to reply, but finds nothing, lest a dry sob escape instead of words, and that will not do.

That will not do at _all_.

“Your arrival was anticipated,” Elrond fills the silence again, after a time, eyes on a horizon, now, that Bilbo cannot find. “Ringbearers were always meant for these shores.”

“You are indeed too kind,” Bilbo says, a little too softly, a little too flat for the gravity of it, for how much it truly does _mean_.

“Hospitable,” Elrond answers, with a sympathy in his voice that Bilbo wants to cry for, just a bit; an understanding that makes no sense even as it rights the world entire.

“There are private quarters beyond these halls, more suited to your needs, specifically,” Elrond carries on, and Bilbo thinks he will not speak it, but perhaps the truth between, left unsaid, will the need for privacy, the need for solitude, for now. 

“Comfort over function, by your standards versus ours. Books,” Elrond lists off; “more than you will ever be able to complete,” and that’s important; 

“Endless reams of parchment.” 

Bilbo’s expression grows wry, he can feel it. 

“I rather think I left my story to my nephew, who left it to his dear Sam,” Bilbo turns to Elrond, then. “That parchment may well go to waste.”

Elron doesn’t turn, but Bilbo feels his gaze from the periphery.

“Very little, I have found, is ever truly wasted,” Elrond tells him, slow but firm; “not entirely.”

Bilbo trusts him, believes him, but finds the words difficult to take into his heart and make _true_. 

“But think not of a story you left behind,” Elrond says, voice a little lighter, hopeful almost; “or a chapter unfinished in it. Might I suggest considering a new story?” He straightens his posture and looks at Bilbo straight on, then: not a challenge, but something resolute in the suggestion that makes it into a thing that is more.

“Should you feel so inclined.”

“Seems presumptuous,” Bilbo answers, his eyes holding Elrond’s gaze. “I think I would not have long here.” 

And Elrond’s lips thin, and then purse in thinking, before he replies.

“By my measuring, perhaps not,” Elrond grants him; “but you will have as long as you need to live and love and feel what you were robbed of out of hate and fear and war,” his tone drops low, then: 

“You will have time enough, until your peace begets your blessing.”

Bilbo’s brow furrows, at that. 

“My Lord?”

Elrond’s face turns soft, wistful at a glance.

“I have sometimes envied the Gift of Man,” he confesses to the ever-changeable breeze. “Your gift, as well. An end, a certainty where the only certainty I know is that I will go on,” he gestures aimlessly into the space too bright for Bilbo to make sense of, far beyond.

“Here, you will know solace, though it may take time,” Elrond tells him. “You will be given freedom, the likes of which you were denied for too long, for the burden carried even in secret, even in times of quiet.”

And those were the worst, perhaps. Always, they teetered on the very worst.

The quiet times. It was why he began to write, he thinks. Why he loved books. So that there was always something in his mind, so that the sunrises didn’t feel as if they were only meant to come if a hand was in his own; so that the night didn’t settle cold without a body next to him, a long beard tickling his skin and a splayed palm splayed against his heart.

“And that freedom will manifest in choice, Bilbo Baggins, but it will not take away your blessing,” Elrond speaks gently, like the sea now—aligned with it, not overcoming it. “The choice is only when you will ask for that blessing to come, among whichever other blessings you may encounter on these shores.”

Bilbo swallows, and clenches his hands against one another where they lay upon his lap.

“That seems,” he looks for the word, even though the one he finds doesn’t quite suit: “unfair.”

“An embarrassment of riches?” Elrond ventures knowingly; too knowingly as Bilbo eyes him.

“Precisely.”

Elrond smiles softly. “It is what your nephew said, when I explained it to him in kind.” 

“He lost more than I,” Bilbo murmurs, his chest seizing for the pain he gave that dear boy, unknowing but still by his hand. “He was, he did—”

“Loss is not a competition, nor a battle to be won,” Elrond says, simple. Plain. “There is no victor in suffering, only a call for compassion to meet the need.”

Bilbo tries to believe that. Hopes it could be true for himself; for others lost to him, others destined elsewhere in the end.

Bilbo loses himself in musing, until a hand rests on his shoulder.

“There is also a vast larder to be found in your accommodations, did I mention?” Elrond tells him, almost conspiratorial, and goodness.

“ _Hospitable_ , you said,” Bilbo smirks, feels delightfully and affectionately led, somehow, to a conclusion despite himself.

“Ever so,” Elrond says, and smiles serenely, which is the closest he generally gets to outright self-satisfaction, Bilbo’s noticed.

Right. Seems he needs to take advantage of a well-stocked larder, and while the ideas bring back bittersweet memories of unexpected guests and flying tea services being tossed across his home?

He finds, entirely uncannily, that his appetite’s returned, just a bit.

________________________

He follows the road as he’s guided to, takes his time, looks to the trees and stares up at the sky—is it s sky?—and breathes deep of sweet smells and spice and all sorts of incongruent pleasantries, soft hints of his mother’s baking, or the singular saltiness of beloved skin he hasn’t tasted in an age and it’s a dull enough ache in the pressure of breathing in time with his footsteps that there’s potential in it, like the first sprouts of green in the spring shot up from soil: there is an inkling that one day, he could find peace here. 

Except then he sees it. 

“No…”

The clearing is obvious, just as they’d said. And what is apparently his new humble abode stands clear, impossible to miss. But for all the wrong reasons. For everything that is not peace, that can never be _peace_ —

“Oh, no, no,” Bilbo breathes, if only barely; “not like this.”

Because the lines of the dwelling before him are hewn of stone, crafted of long endless lines and columns that should break but never do, pillars and arches that echo soft conversations in the dark about what it might be like to rule a kingdom, to sit beside a King, just a simple Hobbit under a mountain without the sun and growing things, and he’d promised, he’d _promised_ Bilbo he’d find a way to bring gardens and the rounded shapes of Hobbiton to his home restored, when he could make Bilbo prince consort of all absurd things and give him all his heart could desire and—

These secret longing in his heart: did this place know them, and pluck them out? And if so, how could it not see what pain it would cause, to have vision made solid without the one he was meant to share it with, to have the whispers of his heart embodied without the presence of his _heart_ —

“It is finished, now, whichever of you pointy-eared missivers have come to visit,” a voice calls from behind some space between the carvings, the artistry of stone and it is only then that Bilbo realizes he’s breathing hard, and nearly choking on the air that seems to flee from him in spades.

“There’s no need to chide an old dwarf,” the voice says again, gruff as it adds on with a grouse: “ _again_.”

And it is only then that Bilbo realizes he’s gasping for air against the dead fantasies unspoken that lie before him; it is only when the voice reveals its owner that Bilbo realizes, because suddenly the gasping simply stops. 

Breathing. All breathing.

Simply _stops_.

“Bilbo.”

There is a ghost—that lost heart beating blood with wide eyes and heaving breath, aged not a day and strong, gaze bright and deep and made of the very things that exist to overwhelm and Bilbo cannot _breathe_. 

“Bilbo?” 

That voice has haunted, blessed his dreams and nightmares for the better part of an age, and Bilbo cannot help it, cannot even know it happens, will happen until it’s too late to stop: a whimper, a dying sob as he himself feels that this must be it, the choice to go, to dissolve into the ether of whatever awaits in the gift of mortality: this must be it, because it aches even as he goes numb, and he doesn’t even know that he’s dropped to his knees until he hears a pair of them, not to his own, hit the dust in kind, beside him. 

“Love,” that voice, because that’s all it can be, in his mind, and maybe that’s all the peace he gets, or deserves: that voice ushering him further on into the netherworlds unknown.

“Bilbo, my dearest heart,” and oh, cruel mind of his, but Bilbo can feel the echoes, the soft drift of unreal breath and nonexistent palms cupping his cheeks, and that’s also when he realizes his eyes are streaming, and he’s shaking desperately, and the voice is asking:

“Can you hear me?”

And of course, of course Bilbo can because he deserves no more or less, has earned neither beyond and and how can fingertips that are long dead, decaying, feeding flowers in the ground far away across the water: how can fingertips in his memories and in the depths of his soul be dampened by his tears?

“I did not make it,” Bilbo mutters, shaking his head against the touch of hands that cannot be; “skin too thin, bones too weak, heart too, too…”

He swallows, and the grasp on his cheeks grows firmer, more desperate: clinging to the ability to be heard and held and known, perhaps, against the inevitable thrust of reality slipping back.

“Bread and butter, dangerous business,” Bilbo murmurs, still shaking his head on rote but the hold upon him impedes the movement: delicate, but unwavering.

“Finally caught up and now,” Bilbo gasps, and his poor heart is thrashing wildly, too old to bear it, and he can feel each beat in the fingertips on his skin but it’s not, it’s _not_ —

“Bilbo,” the voice, the voice from a face that’s a memory buried deep in his thrumming heart, woven close against the very soul he bore to this place.

“You live yet, under the sky and the trees,” and arms surround him, too well-known and too ill-lost. They draw him close, down just a touch where BIlbo’s already curled in upon himself just a bit, trembling, until his hand and his head and nestles in tandem against a solid, study chest: broad and warm and:

“ _Feel_.”

And the truth is, he cannot do anything else. 

For the last time he’d held to the chest, this chest, the chest that cannot be here: the last time, it had gone so quiet, so still in the cold, and Bilbo had felt so much of his own will, his own self steal from the world alongside the life in this body and the rhythm in its blood. 

But under Bilbo’s palm now is the strong rise and fall of breath, it’s warm against his hair; under Bilbo’s palm is a heart that’s singing loud and fierce and full, and Bilbo doesn’t know what to do, in the face of what is maybe, possibly everything he’d lost, he doesn’t know. 

He doesn’t know, save to grasp at precisely what he did when in fact it was taken before: he chokes on tears that stopper his throat and steal his breath as he chokes; keens:

“It can’t be.”

“I will not deny that I believed the same,” the voice, and the solidity of the body it seems to emanate from, the _impossibility_ from whence it seems to stream; “still believe it, more often than not,” the voice says softly, gently as much as the soft pad of a thumb on Bilbo’s jaw; “and yet.”

“And yet?” Bilbo prompts, despite himself.

“The Flame Imperishable,” the unrepentantly solid vision, and it is no less than that, _he_ is no less than that: this projection of Bilbo’s long-straining, failing heart before eyes he cannot trust, for all they bleed together the shades of the sunset, for all that cannot scout a horizon line beyond. 

The vision is so solid, so real; it makes no sense.

The words, in kind, fail to resonate, fail to stand.

“What?”

“They said to me, in the Halls of my Fathers,” that voice, and Bilbo can’t say the name it sounds like, aches like; not yet but close, too close; too dangerous as familiar hands somehow trace down his shoulders, draw him close enough to lean his forehead against a warm brow; near enough to feel breath itself.

“They said to be that the Great Maker would have me remain where I stood, for my deeds were egregious even if my mind was corrupted beyond my fending,” the voice is strained, but sure; honest; “the blessing of death was still mine to hold, as with all my kin.”

Yes. Yes, that is sense. That is heartbreak, but _sense_ —

“And yet the Secret Fire, Spirit of Eru,” the voice continues, awed and soft like the moment could shatter the illusion of this unthinkable turn of fate.

“Ringbearers were always meant for Valinor.”

“Yes,” Bilbo nods; this he has been told, been shown; “yes, but—”

“The _spirit_ of the sentiment, of the exception to the rule,” the hands on his shoulders grip just so slightly tighter. 

“You bore a ring,” the breath at his ear is so soft, so true; “and I bore you in my _heart_ to the very end, and beyond.”

And oh, oh—from Ilúvatar to every demon, every bliss in dreams to every pain in waking: this is Thorin.

This may be a dream in itself, but it is _Thorin_ , this touch, this breath, this heart beating in the breast that Bilbo finds himself tucked into, sobbing freely now and clinging for instinct, for absolute _need_ : this is Thorin.

Against all reason, all possible tomorrows: this is _his Thorin_.

“I have missed you,” Bilbo says, cries, aches against Thorin’s body for all that this transcends the possible, and all that it seeps into his long-weary bones as life-giving _truth_. “More days, more hours than I can count, I have _missed_...”

“Peace,” Thorin breathes against his temple, presses soft lips there and holds to speak into the skin. 

“Peace, my sweet one,” he urges softly; “gentle now, for we are here beyond all ends, and there is time.”

And Bilbo isn’t sure if he can believe it, not yet in the swift shivering of his heart, but he reaches without thought to logic, with just the need in him, and pulls Thorin’s lips to his own, passionate from the very first and met with knowing, with knowing that only one person in all of time, in all the world and its hereafters could ever have and he tastes the same, he tastes precisely the _same_ and—

“Tell me you are real,” Bilbo whimpers, and isn’t sure what weight a prayer has in the lands of divinity itself, but if weight there is, Bilbo harnesses every drop for those words, for the pleading they push forth from his very soul.

“Tell me _you_ are real,” Thorin whispers back, and still almost growls, at odds and yet perfectly suited to how gentle, how strong and safe his hands hold to Bilbo’s arms; “for if you are real, I can learn each of these,” and Thorin’s fingerprints on long-forgotten echoes of past hurt, scars grown light with the years since Thorin; adventures after.

“And I can trace each of these,” Thorin cradles his face, thumbing Bilbo’s ‘s wrinkles, the folders of aged skin at his cheek bones, the lines near his eyes and his lips and Bilbo thinks to shy back—merely think it, and only for the barest of instants—but think it he does, in the face of that smooth touch, of the youth in the face that considers his own, and yet Thorin is watching him, studying him with such unabased and unadulterated reverence that Bilbo can only lean, can only beg the universe for more unearned miracles that lie in the feeling of that hand upon his flesh.

“Tell me you are real, so that I can cherish every inch of you for a thousand tomorrows to come and I can learn the way these curls turn anew, in different waves,” Thorin mouths against Bilbo’s jaw, and Bilbo shivers as he hasn’t had reason or thought to for far too long— 

“And how your skin feels beneath my hands in this otherworldly sun, the beat of your pulse beneath my lips for when we sink into the sand, beneath the trees,” and his pulse is a baby bird in the palm of a hand, fluttering wildly under Thorin’s lips before the soft silk of Thorin’s words continue, only now with a roughness, a heaviness to the sound: 

“Against the bed I’d hoped might be for us both,” Thorin murmurs, but doesn’t move from where he speaks against Bilbo’s neck, hidden there as his breath moves ever so quick: “if you wished it, if you could still—”

And Bilbo will have none of that, thank you, and in exchange will have all of the beautiful creature before him, as his arms move to encircle and clutch tight to Thorin’s body, chest to chest so that Bilbo’s thinned hair floats on Thorin’s breath; so Thorin’s braids tickle Bilbo’s chin before their mouths touch and Thorin just barely speaks: 

“Tell me _you_ are real,” and the word catches light against the swell of Bilbo’s lips: “because if you are real, then we have _time_.”

And this, Bilbo thinks, is what they meant: time. When they told him: when he wishes. When he chooses. Time to find peace he never dreamt to know again—this was what the sailing was for, was toward, was _to_.

When he chooses. As he chooses.

He blinks, and he breathes, and Bilbo Baggins kisses the dwarf that stole his whole heart a lifetime ago, and never gave it back, with the force of every choice left to his body; to his soul.

And his beloved dwarf, his Thorin, well: his Thorin kisses back fiercely, achingly, _perfect_ , and so Bilbo suspects his choice, however it splays from here; his wish, however it forms someday in words—

Well: for whomever thinks to weigh its worth, he suspects it’s good enough.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
